by Gareth Otton
“They say that statue was built on the spot where it happened,” his dad whispered, geeking out as he always did when he spoke about this stuff. “Imagine it, Timmy. Sixteen years ago, on this very spot, that man tore a hole in reality itself and ended what could have been the worst war we’ve ever seen. Makes you think, doesn’t it?”
Tim couldn’t hide the shiver he felt at his dad’s words. They were similar to what he learnt about at school, but there was hearing them from a teacher and then there was this. It was strange to be standing on the spot where history actually happened.
“And here’s the big one,” his dad said, sounding excited as they left the statue of the dreamwalker behind and a new, much more impressive statue appeared. Even Tim had to admit to being in a little awe of what had been done with this one.
It wasn’t one statue, but a whole host of statues that depicted soldiers shooting soldiers, men flinging fireballs, and all manner of violent chaos. However, standing right at the front of them all and dwarfed by what happened behind him, was the figure of a boy who didn’t look like he was much taller than Tim was himself. He had his back turned to the chaos behind him and he had a cocky grin on his face that almost looked like he was mocking the people who had come to see this statue.
The sacrifice that saved the world - Tony Suen.
Tim stared at the plaque in front of the statue, truly understanding those words for the first time. Everyone knew the story of the ghost that gave up his afterlife to stop a war. But just like with the last statue, there was knowing something happened, and then there was standing in the spot where that thing happened. Again, a shiver ran down his spine and he was transfixed, which was why he jumped so hard when his dad spoke again.
“Go stand next to the statue. I want to take your picture with it.”
He blushed when he was forced to go stand next to the statue and smile as his dad raised his wrist and tapped the screen wrapped around it. There was a flash that momentarily blinded Tim, then his dad was taking his hand again and leading him away.
“Wait until your mom see’s this,” he said as they continued to follow the line and passed yet more statues.
As impressive as the statues were, it didn’t take long for the novelty of the place to wear off and for Tim’s interest to wane. It didn’t help that it was freezing.
“Are we going to be much longer?” he asked when it felt like they were going to walk forever down this path.
“Not much longer. I just want to see the Dream Gate and then we can go. It’s just around the corner, I promise.”
Tim yawned but didn’t answer, simply holding his dad’s hand and waiting for this to be over. He had to admit that it was interesting at first, but it was just a bunch of statues of famous people, and he was getting bored with looking at them. He was so bored that he started looking between the statues into the darkness beyond, at first just looking into the distance and alone with his thoughts, but then frowning as he recognised that there was something amongst the shadows.
It was a strange silhouette that he couldn’t quite make out, almost like a large broken hill. The more he looked at it, the more fascinated he became for some reason.
“What’s that?” he asked his dad.
“What?” He followed Tim’s finger out into the darkness and squinted as his eyes tried to peer past the light of the dreamcatchers. “There’s nothing but… Oh, you mean the rubble. That’s the old tower that was blown up in the first Merging.”
“It’s still here?” Tim asked, surprised that no one had ever cleaned it up.
“It always will be. You have to pass through the Dream Gate to get to it, but doing that takes you into Dream and I don’t think anyone has ever been amongst that rubble ever since. Hey, look, Tim. There it is,” his dad said, suddenly excited. “The Dream Gate.”
Hearing the awe in his father’s voice, Tim looked up to see an enormous arch that must have been over a hundred feet tall at least. It was lavishly decorated with dreamcatchers and other carvings of nightmares and mad ghosts, and was impressive enough, but something about it failed to grab Tim’s attention. Maybe it was because it didn’t seem real, almost like it was a prop from a movie that had been designed to look cool, but didn’t really mean anything. His father and the other tourists were fascinated by it, but Tim’s attention was drawn back to the darkness and the enormous pile of rubble that no one else seemed to care about.
That’s the real dream gate, he thought, and even at his young age, he knew why the new one had been built. It was hardly impressive, just a massive pile of rubble. Hardly something to please all the tourists that came by every year.
But there was something about the place that fascinated Tim, and he couldn’t help but keep looking into the darkness where no one else cared to look. That was why he was the only one to see the man step out of nothingness atop the pile of stones.
Tim froze, staring at the silhouette with his mouth hanging open and his eyes wide as shock robbed him of speech. He had seen dreamwalkers step out of thin air before and he travelled by dreamcatchers every day, so he was more than used to the phenomenon. But there was something different about this man that Tim couldn’t look away from.
The longer he looked, the more his eyes grew accustomed to the darkness and Tim could pick out details. The man wasn’t very tall, but his beard almost touched his waist and his hair was even longer. His clothes were torn and dirty, but even as stained as they were, Tim recognised that they were like no clothes he had ever seen. They were made from some strange, glossy, scaly material, almost like it was the hide of a lizard made of mirrors. As the man turned his head to look around, those mirrors caught the light of the dreamcatchers around the site, and Tim wondered why no one else was seeing this.
He was about to grab his dad when the man’s head turned and he looked directly at Tim. What Tim saw in the darkness made his breath catch in his throat. There was something wrong with the man’s face. His eyes were too large, maybe double the size they should have been, and it was hard to make out, but it looked like they were completely black.
The man stared back at Tim, not moving for a long minute. Then he blinked, and Tim gasped as the eyes didn’t blink vertically like normal people, but the lids closed like curtains, sliding in from the sides.
The man made a strange noise that was barely audible over the sound of the crowd surrounding Tim, then he disappeared, and Tim gasped again.
This wasn’t like a dreamwalker vanishing as there was no pop, and something about the way he vanished seemed almost too slow.
Tim’s heart was pounding as he stared into the darkness, but when a hand landed on his shoulder, he screamed and jumped away.
“Timmy, easy. What’s up with you?” his father asked.
“Can we go, dad? I want to go.”
“But we haven’t seen the statues on the other side of the Dream Gate yet,” his dad complained. “We’ll only be ten more minutes. I know this isn’t as exciting to you as it is for me, but can you hold on that long, please?”
Tim wanted to say no, wanted to leave this place as soon as possible. He didn’t know who that strange man was, but the more he thought of the figure, the more it terrified him. However, he had caused enough of a scene already, so he settled for grabbing onto his dad’s hand and holding on tight as he stuck close to his father and kept his eyes on the statues.
The promised ten minutes turned into twenty, and every passing second of it, Tim kept returning to that moment when that man had spotted him and his strange eyes had blinked. And that noise he made. It almost sounded like a word, but it was like no word that Tim had ever heard.
The more Tim thought about it, the more he hoped his mind had been playing tricks on him. This was Cardiff after all, the Dream and ghost capital of the world. That could have been anything or anyone standing on top of that pile of bricks. However, though he wished otherwise, he knew what he had seen was real. There was something about the way it moved, the way it stood�
� it just felt a bit too imperfect to be anything but real.
As they finished their loop of the Tony Suen Dream Gate and ended up at yet another enormous terminal, Tim couldn’t hide his relief at being able to go home. As the transport pad flashed, changing the world around him to somewhere more familiar, he hoped he might be able to leave the ominous feeling that accompanied that strange man behind, but no such luck.
As he left his street’s terminal and headed home, those odd eyes haunted him, and though he had no evidence to support it, he couldn’t shake a simple thought that kept bouncing around his head.
He knew he was crazy for even thinking this, but Tim was sure he just saw an actual alien. However, as crazy as that thought was, in a world where dreams came true, stranger things had happened.
The End
Afterword
We’re finally here, the ending of this story I started writing back in 2016, long before I had any intention of publishing this series. I hope you enjoyed reading these stories as much as I have enjoyed writing them, and that the ending was everything you hoped it might be.
This is the end of this chapter in the lives of Tad, Stella and Jen, but it’s not the end of their story. However, it will be a little while before we see what life has in store for them next. Their world needs a few years for the dust to settle and to get to grips with a new, more magical existence. As you might have guessed from the epilogue, there will be a big time jump between the end of this novel and the start of the next, but I promise you won’t have to wait until 2032 before the sequel comes out.
With the Dreams of Reality series done, I can move on to some other projects that I have been dying to get started on for a long time. It also gives me a chance to try out a new format for my writing in an effort to get my books out faster.
I am going to initially publish my next story (The Sterenteem Chronicles) as a web series, with a book version coming out later. The first chapter will drop on Friday, 1st October 2021, and the chapters will come out daily from there on out.
This new experiment will be a big change for the way I write. At the moment I write a novel in complete drafts, not editing a single word until the whole book is written, and then doing multiple editing passes until I think it’s done. This way of writing means that each draft is like running a marathon. It’s time consuming and feels like an enormous task. This new format will allow me to break that up so I can write and do my edits without getting so fatigued.
Long story short, this should mean less time between books which is hopefully a good thing.
For more information about this new series, please keep reading for a synopsis of The Wonders of Sterentium, the first novel in The Sterenteem Histories. And for information on where you can read the web series, stay tuned to my Facebook page (facebook.com/gjotton) or my website (gareth-otton.com). Along with news about the upcoming series, there will be more news about other projects I have planned for the remainder of 2021, including the launch of a new YouTube channel.
For now though, thank you all for going on this journey with me and for your continued support. If you liked this book, then please leave a review on sites like Amazon and Goodreads as they really do help a lot.
Thanks again.
Gareth Otton
The Sterenteem Histories: Book 1
The Wonders of Sterentium
Their planet is shattered. Their world destroyed. Yet somehow, humanity survives.
For thousands of years, the mages of the Magnifica have kept humanity alive upon the largest fragment of their shattered world by wielding the very magic that destroyed their planet. That magic is now the heart and soul of their society. Those who can wield it prosper, while those who can not, struggle just to survive.
Rizzo MagVarius was on the path to becoming the greatest mage of his generation, but fate had other plans. Cast out from magical society, stripped of all power and resources, Rizzo must rely on the kindness of people he has looked down on his entire life if he is to survive long enough to reclaim what was taken from him.
His journey takes him to the frontier fragments, where non-magical people are learning to survive in an environment where magic has changed the very land they live on, the food they eat, and even the water they drink. It is a hard existence, far removed from the luxuries he is used to, and Rizzo struggles to see a way back from this.
But he might be in for a surprise, because in an environment where people are forging new lives out of nothing, he might just find a path that would take him to new heights that he could never have dreamed of before.
◆◆◆
The Wonders of Sterentium is the first book in a new series that will follow humanity's trials at learning to survive, and hopefully thrive, on the shattered fragments of their home world.
Having spent thousands of years on just one fragment and with magic changing every aspect of the shattered planet, the people of Sterenteem have no idea what they are letting themselves in for.
Books In This Series
The Dreams of Reality
Proxy
Tad Holcroft doesn’t just talk to ghosts, he lets them live in his head. They pay rent in the form of memories, knowledge and talents.
Tad can do this because he’s a Proxy… which isn’t good news at the moment.
Proxies are disappearing mysteriously all over Britain. As one of the last Proxies remaining, Tad needs to truly test his powers for the first time to figure it out before he or his daughter disappears next.
He also has to deal with a world that’s growing aware of the Supernatural and solve the murder of an old friend, all while juggling the mood swings of a twelve-year-old daughter, the antics of a teenage ghost, and history lessons from Charles Dickens, a ghost two hundred years dead with a chip on his shoulder because that other, more famous Charles Dickens hogged all the glory.
It’s a bit much for a history teacher from Cardiff, but the consequences of failure are bigger than he can imagine.
Nightmares
After the events of Proxy, the whole world has changed and people are looking to Tad for answers. Unfortunately, Tad is busy picking up the broken pieces of his life.
Between mourning lost friends, struggling with his guilt over their deaths, helping Tony to adapt to a new existence, looking after his daughter, and somehow keeping a new relationship alive; Tad isn’t ready for another supernatural threat that only he can deal with.
However, the world isn’t prepared to wait. They know who he is now… know what he is… and they’re not shy in seeking him out, especially when the stakes are so high.
The nightmares are coming, and the people of the world are looking to the Dreamwalker to save them.
Dreamcatchers
Nightmares plague the Borderlands, protest groups turn violent against the ‘dreamwalker threat’, and the world creeps ever closer to war.
Firmly placed at the heart of this chaos is Tad Holcroft, and he’s got his daughter’s thirteenth birthday to plan.
If that wasn’t enough on his plate, once again dreamwalkers are being hunted. This time the hunters are armed with supernatural weapons that are custom made to kill dreamwalkers, and the fight is spilling onto American soil, taking the global tension to an all-time high.
With his ghost acting out, Stella’s fledgling Dream Team struggling with teething problems, and the Prime Minister breathing down his neck, Tad finds it hard to imagine how his life could be any more chaotic.
Did someone say puppies? Three of them? Perfect…
Uprising
Tad will do anything to get his daughter back. Unfortunately, that obsession blinds him to danger from enemies, and even from allies.
The world is closer to war than ever, dangerous people have Stella in their crosshairs to protect their secrets, and the British government is creating radical new laws to protect the public from the Dreamwalker threat.
Facing attacks on all fronts, Tad and Stella have to fight harder than ever just to survive. Against
such odds, how can they possibly make their dream come true and bring Jen home where she belongs?